Excerpt from Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One

Shenandoah

Things don't just appear into thin--

... but she hangs up on him before he finishes. "What the ... ?" he says, staring at his cell phone in dismay and trying to remember if she ever hung up on him before. As he finishes filling the tank of his truck and replaces the pump's nozzle, Aaron ponders how this became the kind of argument where his wife hangs up on him. He hauls himself back up into the driver's seat thinking maybe this is really the kind of argument that's about something other than what it's about.

Startinghe u the ignition, turning down the oldies station on the radio, he sits a minute irritably checking the rearview mirror. An- other truck waits for him to pull away from the pump. Aaron remembers that he meant to get a donut and Red Bull from the gas station's convenience market, some concentrated discharge of sugar and caffeine to take him the rest of the way to Rapid City.


The unnamed song

He looks at his cell to see if she's texted. "Fuck if I'm apologizing!" he says out loud to nobody and nothing; without his donut and Red Bull, he glides back out onto Interstate 90 in his red truck with its gold racing stripes and the bumper sticker that reads save america from itself. When he first put on the sticker, he thought he knew what it meant. The more he's thought about it since, the less sure he is.

Aaron considers the one time he fell asleep at the wheel. It couldn't have been longer than a couple of seconds, but enough to start veering off the road until another truck's horn blared him into consciousness. His heart didn't stop pounding till he finished the route: If you want to wake yourself up good for the rest of a drive, try falling asleep at the wheel for a moment. On the radio a man and woman sing to each other, not with each other, having their own argument maybe. She hung up on me, he's thinking, "I'm not apologizing, fuck that." But he's had fights with Cilla Ann before and knows, as his indignation subsides, that if she hasn't texted by the other side of the bridge at Chamberlain crossing the Missouri River, he'll wind up calling.


Summer wine

Is something else wrong? he wonders. Is there something else going on with her? Can this fight actually be about something as trivial as his wallet gone missing, vanished from his jacket? even if now he's a driver without an identity. The man and woman singing to each other on the radio aren't exactly arguing. It's kind of a cow- boy song but not exactly, half a century old, trippy with spy-movie horn riffs—although Aaron, not caring about music, doesn't break it down like that. Instead he catches out of the corner of his ear the story that the cowboy sings in the deepest voice anyone's heard ...

... of the woman seducing him with wine made of strawberries, cherries, and an angel's kiss in spring, so she can steal his silver spurs while he sleeps. If I'm being honest, Aaron admits to himself ruefully about the conversation with Cilla Ann, I know it's not true that things don't just disappear into thin air. If I'm honest and I've learned anything in this life, it's that things disappear into thin air all the time.

The woman singing on the radio reminds Aaron that these are the last days of summer, nine days before the fall.


Cross the wide Missouri

The music that he pays little mind is only something in the background to keep him company and awake. "A song finishes," he says out loud, "ask me what I just heard, I have no idea." Sometimes instead he'll listen to the talk radio until it becomes too nuts, or the CB radio that's broken at the moment, Aaron having tried futilely back in Mitchell to get it fixed. In his early forties, he drives Interstate 90 at least three times a week counting both to and from, sometimes four or five if he can hustle up the commerce. Sometimes when the traffic of other trucks is at a maxi- mum, or just because he feels like it, he cuts down to Highway 44 running through the plains beyond Buffalo Gap.

Excerpted from Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson. Copyright © 2017 by Steve Erickson. Excerpted by permission of Blue Rider Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.